Now that it’s harvest season, I’m curious: How did your garden grow this summer?

Wasn’t it thrilling, in those early days, to watch your vegetable patch begin to come alive? To step into your garden in the dewy dawn and see what magic had transpired during the night, how each brave green shoot had grown a little taller? And then, after only a few weeks, to spot adorable tomatoes and green peppers, no bigger than you might find in a dollhouse kitchen? To peek under a fuzzy leaf and encounter a shy cucumber the size of a p… Continue Reading Garden Growing Pains here.

Is this seat taken? Actually, I’d better sit over here, so you can be on my good-ear side. I’ll hear you much better, especially when the band starts up. I should probably get a hearing aid, but I’m saving up for dental implants… Continue reading Me, Flirting here.

When a female employee, or potential employee, enters my office, and I greet her by locking the door and telling her to lift her skirt so that I may see her underpants, or to turn around so that I may “get a good look” at her buttocks, I will try to remember that her silence, or her statement “I don’t think so,” may not be an attempt to get me to persuade her with flattering references to her smoking bod…Read more at the New Yorker

Because when we don’t take the time each day to count our Gratitudes, our Ingratitudes rush right in and take over. And then we are off to the fucking races, are we not? Life can seem to be nothing but the accretion of the many unfortunate, heartbreaking, humiliating things that happen to us, until we finally die, alone and in diapers, leaving all of our money to two cats named Bosco and… Read more at the New Yorker.

I am very excited about “Bust,” my new TV show. It has a strong feminist slant and stars me, as homicide detective Casey O’Malley. Every week, a woman gets murdered in some hideous, hair-raising fashion, and I relentlessly track down the perps—the rapists, the serial killers, the wife beaters, the sex traffickers, the victims’ creepy gynecologists and professors and fitness trainers, their incestuous dads, their sadistic pimps, their pervy ministers, and their weirdo neighbors.… Read more.

I am certainly not going back into the house where something bad or creepy has happened to me already. I am never going to a carnival or a fair, especially if there is happy calliope music playing. You will not find me owning, or spending any time with, a ventriloquist’s dummy, or the kind of doll that “walks and talks.”

For a while, what I missed most in changing from a married person into a single person was the act that we were as a couple. I don’t mean an act as in a piece of fakery, although toward the end it was kind of fake. I mean it in the sense of how we were when we went out in the world.…

You know what I’m tired of? People being so down on themselves for not remembering things. Doesn’t it seem like everyone you know over a certain age is spending way too much time saying, “Dammit, I just saw that movie yesterday, and I can’t remember what it’s called. This is terrible.” That’s so negative. Quitcherbellyachin’! Celebrate what you do remember!

For example, I was in Duane Reade the other day, forgetting what I was there for, and, yes, getting bummed out about it. Then I remembered that I was there for some kind of hair product, only I couldn’t remember what it was. Then I remembered that it was the stuff that comes in a bottle that you wash your hair with, but I couldn’t remember what it’s called, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to ask any of the employees to help me find it. Just as I was about to throw myself a great big pity party there in the hair-care aisle, my eye caught a display of those fake tortoiseshell headbands. And my brain said, “Lynne Tryforos.” Read more…